#randomly generated cities like fractals

[jackalopegothic]

City Theses

1. there is no such thing as architecture without people.

2. no towers are built without people. no towers are called towers if they are not seen.

3. even if architecture is not lived in, it is inhabited.

4. absence is a habitation too

5. a building defined by the absence of people then defines the people that are absent. we imagine how the cities shaped them, instead of how they shaped the cities.

6. to live in a city is to adapt to its shape, but it is also to contribute to it.

7. who lives in the city that no one has made?

[goldlockingterritories]

Obvious

A transhuman god is upset at the departure of her children, and is at odds with her partner.

Natalia peered over the scene before her: A parade, climbing along a street wedged between shiny black glass skyscrapers and polished concrete apartment buildings. Her view stood above it all, showing her all of the city; an urban sprawl, clustering in the middle, a suburb of lawn sprinklers and freshly cut grass to the west, oakwood docks and caramel colored beaches to the east. Further down west past the suburbs are all rural deserts and forests, full of buggy driving rednecks, tobacco growing hermits and cocaine hauling gangsters in speedos. All neatly nested within the small, lonely island.

She wasn’t going to tell the city government any of what she saw far west; they were the ones who made the decision to leave her. 

She returned to the real world: grey rocky landscape, and sleek black spires in the distance, spewing out pillars of smoke into the sky, joining the dark, electrified clouds.

The clouds weren’t normal; she could almost see the ocean of micro and nano machines swirling around on their pinwheel joints, connecting their long flagella wires, pushing atmosphere and delivering energy and messages all around the planet. A circulatory, respiratory, and nervous system all rolled into one big blanket for the whole world...

A large black seed shaped object hovered in the sky, the sharper end pointed upwards. It was obvious to Natalia what would happen; the clouds would synthesize the fuel, load it onto the rocket, and launch Natalia’s children past the sky and into space, where it would blossom, unfurling it’s sails and carry off riding the light of the stars. 

Everything was obvious to Natalia now. 

If she wanted to understand circuitry and rocket science, she did. If she wanted to understand chemistry and biology, she did. If she wanted to know how to create life, control the weather, travel the cosmos, she did.

And it was obvious why she could; she wasn’t human anymore. Her name hadn’t always been Natalia, but she had burned through so many at this point. She supposed that she picked that quality up from her partner.

“Leaving?” Speak of the devil, and you shall receive them.

They had many names and faces throughout their life; Carried in by wings that should’ve been invisible to Natalia, had it not been obvious, was Jules. An azure blue dress shirt hugged them underneath a black, floral patterned waistcoat and matching black jeans with gilded zipper pockets.

“Not me,” She began, knowing Jules already knew the answer, “My yggdrasil children.”

Yug-Drasil, the pronunciation rolled off her tongue as if she was fluent in the language (she was, obviously), and she couldn’t tell whether or not she read that somewhere, or if it was a signal plopped in her head by their new brain.

The world trees dotted the continent; branches composed of centimeter by centimeter metallic cubes, each holding the equivalent of entire human brains, billions of molecular neurons packed into something that could fit in the palm of a hand. Each mind was attached to a shared computer simulation, a virtual environment, either randomly generated or designed by Natalia, or Jules. Whole countries could be fitted in the space of a medium sized farmhouse, 30 souls a foot.

Natalia had reared an entire society in one, fully aware of the outside world. And they wanted to leave.

“I fixed it, by the way,” Natalia’s pause barely covered a microsecond when Jules spoke.

She didn’t bother asking for an answer she already knew. “My sabotage,” She said.

A special colony of micromachines, activated by sunlight, designed to devour Mylar, the material used on a solar sail. Jules must have picked them out, like a baboon picking out ticks from a mate’s fur coat and eating them, when the rocket went through the clouds.

“You bastard,” A smile infected her face, reaching her eyes. She used to have a volatile competitive streak; now she loved it when someone outsmarted her.

Jules regarded her with a drab expression, a soft smile touching their lips, but never their eyes. 

She wouldn’t have hurted them, only keep them stuck in orbit. If she could have her way now, she would’ve made it so that none of her children could leave. But that was the deal their older faces made long ago, when the trees were first thought of; let life go on. It’s only natural for Jules to uphold it. 

She hated them and she loved them, so she walked up and planted a kiss on their lips, and pulled them in. 

Her mind drifted off, summoning an Eidolon. Several kilometers north of here, at the base of a spire, micromachines sprung up from the ground like a trail of ants climbing along their own backs, climbing along lattice structures made of themselves, all together forming a single grey shape composed of arms, legs, a torso, and a head. The micromachines texturize themselves, forming smooth skin and dangling fabrics, pigment and color spreading across it, revealing Natalia in her short blonde hair, black leather garments and boots. 

The strange flesh and silicone blood Natalia, undressing herself with Jules on top of her, sent abstract commands to her Eidolon as it sent back short term memories. Eidolon Natalia regarded the spire; A power plant, delivering electricity to the machine clouds above, as if solar power wasn’t enough (she knew it wasn’t). This one would be using fusion to vaporize water into steam, spinning a sheet of micro turbines. Electricity would climb to the tip of the spire, where micromachines would distribute it amongst themselves in an invisible network.

Natalia commanded her Eidolon to move elsewhere, so she conjured a set of wings. They attached themselves to the Eidolon’s body, embedding straps to it’s fake skeletal structure, and pulled it off the ground.

The wings didn’t flap; it swirled air below and behind with a cloth made of a million tiny fans. A dust storm formed in the north, one of the only natural threats present on the planet. She knew an invisible wall would be forming around the storm, isolating and neutralizing it. 

Desolate buildings whizzed by below her feet; Skyscrapers, castles, mansions, houses, cabins, and towers. When Jules and Natalia first came here, that was all they had ever done; build and build and build. They stretched their creative abilities, at least when they still had human minds. 

After that, they just lived here. Sometimes together, sometimes isolated. Then the network was created, sinking its roots into the ground below, and Jules and Natalia connected themselves to it. Her name was Jacqueline when that happened, and Jules was Nathaniel.

The lone structures below transitioned into clusters of villages and townships, groupings of decrepit and abandoned housing. Things became obvious for Jack and Than, or rather they started to tap into the bank of knowledge and expertise that was the planet-wide superintelligence. Whenever they sensed or thought something, hundreds of artificial neurons parsed through it, predicted a query, and sent the answer as an electrical pulse that the brain interpreted as knowledge it already had. 

Every science and every byte of knowledge became like common sense to them. Obvious. 

And so, it became obvious what was missing from their- or rather Jack and Than’s - lives: People. So, they took what they knew, and built some people, called Simms. Like that ancient video game.

A patch worked house stood below Natalia. One of Than’s. Castles and junkyard additions erupted from its roof, colorful graffiti all over it. The Simms had breathed life into their world, returning complex relationships, conflict, and an extra pair of creativity. 

Jules pulled their lips from the real Natalia, a smile still present as they looked down at her. “Where are you going?”

Another Eidolon erupted from the ground below, growing to encompass a height of 20 feet, lumbering over the house. It’s body texturized into skin, no clothing, revealing the black haired face of Jules staring up at her. Jules always loved provoking imagery.

“My mind wandered, decided to take a stroll down memory lane,” Natalia and her Eidolon spoke in sync.

“You would have me think that,” A smile stretched across Eidolon Jules face, “wouldn’t you?”

Their belly inflated, rumbling, and something climbed up their throat. They opened their mouth, muffled screams following, and eventually an arm, followed by the blonde haired head of a middle aged man.

“Oh god!” The figure exclaimed in anguish and horror, “Please help me!”

Natalia knew the man; John Yak, third generation of the Yak family, ex-military (or so he thought), strict father of three. He used to live in the patchwork house, and his son was the one who built the castle tower for his kids.

“Please god!” Than designed John to be aggressive, loyal, prideful, and especially arrogant, being the one who stuffed the house with taxidermy and bear carpets from his hunts. He died when he was eaten by a polar bear.

The Eidolon pursed his lips around the Simm, making a slurping sound. John shrieked as he was drawn back down into the Eidolon’s belly.

“That supposed to scare me?” Natalia spoke up to Jules.

“No,” Jules said, and Natalia braced for another cryptic answer, “It’s supposed to scare me.”

“Oh stuff it, would you.” Natalia stretched her head to theirs, embracing Jules again. Eidolon Natalia continued her journey, and the giant naked Jules watched her leave with a smile, until disintegrating into grey fractal dust.

[monstersdownthepath]

Nowhere

All Roads Lead To Nowhere.

The First World is a mess, and that’s putting it as generously as possible. The efforts of the Eldest to establish some sense of order on the plane have created pockets of relative stability, but the majority of the First World has a whimsical will of its own about what paths lead to what place and how long it takes to get there. A trip that took you a day before may take you three, or five, or seven the next time you try, or you may make the walk in a single hour, or in some rare cases you may end up arriving yesterday. No matter what fractal pretzel the plane has twisted itself into, though, so long as you know where you’re going, you’ll get there eventually.

Don’t have a destination in mind, though? You may end up Nowhere.

The laws of physics in the First World are set by the people with the force of will to write them. Those with sufficient emotional strength can more or less tell the plane where they want to be, and it will get them there, and likewise they can gain some control over the reins of the plane to generate some stability for themselves, letting them affect temperature and gravity to their liking to make their trip comfortable. The will of the wanderer is king, and someone walking with purpose can always count on reaching their finish line of choice, even though it may take them a while to get there.

So what happens if you just flit around willy-nilly without telling the plane where you’re going or what you’re doing? Well, more often than not, you’ll just end up wherever it damn well feels like dropping you, and it’s your own fault for not giving it clear instructions. Then again, sometimes you DO give it clear instructions, and it dumps you wherever it damn well pleases anyway because how DARE you give it commands? But anyway, the usual case is that you wander to a random point of the First World and are set on your merry way... But sometimes, sometimes you trip. Not literally! But sometimes your foot metaphorically catches the rug and you go tumbling down the cellar stairs, winding up in Nowhere, an area of the First World that can't be reached on purpose.

A bright, sunless, cloudless blue sky, an endless field of knee-high (exactly knee-high, no matter how high or low your knees are) green grass and gently rolling hills. This is Nowhere, and this is where everyone who doesn’t know where they’re going ends up. It’s a common saying in the First World that “all roads lead to Nowhere,” and this is true; you can reach it from anywhere so long as you don’t know where you’re going, wandering aimlessly from Point A with no thought afforded to Points B through Z or 1-2-3 until the First World gets confused and spits you out in the infinite field, where you’ll stay until you make up your mind.

Getting to Nowhere is easy to do if you’re an absentminded and inattentive clown with irrepressible wanderlust, and getting out is even easier, since all you need to do to get out is pick a direction and walk while thinking of somewhere else you want to be. You may not end up exactly where you asked, but you won’t be stuck in Nowhere anymore! However, Nowhere is a hell of a lot harder to enter if you actually want to get in. You can only end up in Nowhere if you don’t know where you want to go, after all, and wanting to go Nowhere counts as knowing where you want to go! It’s as confusing and contradictory a conundrum to the First World as it is for you and me, I assure you, and attempts to purposely travel to Nowhere often end up with the plane losing its patience and throwing you anywhere and everywhere else... Sometimes even into another plane entirely. 

But why would you want to go to Nowhere, anyway? You can’t really build anything in it, because there’s nothing to build with but loose soil and grass, two materials notoriously terrible for building anything but little huts or wicker baskets. Besides, even if you DID build yourself a little home there, you’d never be able to find it again. Say you left Nowhere to do a little shopping in Anophaeus! Good job, now you can’t get back home, because trying to reach your little house in Nowhere counts as a destination. And even if you somehow ended up back in Nowhere later on, you’ll never find your little hut again, even if you searched for the rest of your life. Similarly, anything you leave behind in Nowhere is gone forever... So I suppose it’s good for disposing of things you never want to find again, but there’s easier ways to do that!

So... Why? Well, there’s the fact that the Eldest known as Ng the Hooded and the Lost Prince tend to wander its fields. Normally, anyone lost in Nowhere has no chance of ever seeing anyone else, but the presence of the Eldest act as lighthouses in the ocean of grass and hills, allowing visitors to speak privately to the godlike fey. There are easier (though less personal) ways to get an audience with both Ng and the Lost Prince that don’t involve wandering dangerously around the First World, you know! But certainly no other way to get an audience with Nobody.

Nobody Knows is the only creature to have ever made a permanent home within Nowhere that it can leave and re-enter at will, and it is only through Nowhere that one can obtain a personal audience with the famed Memory Mason. Nobody will oftentimes appear within the markets of the First World (and rarely in other planes) for mere hours before returning once more to Nowhere, and in these markets it sells very limited wares. Only by visiting its shop, Recollection Collections and Memory Mementos, can one purchase its truly powerful treasures, and only by listlessly traveling through Nowhere can one find this shop.

Anyone trying to purposely visit Nobody will have quite the difficult trek before them... But methods that are relatively easy DO exist. For example, tracking down one of the Archfey’s more powerful Feysworn and bargaining with them to access the store’s back door, Nobody’s gift to its servants who’ve reached high enough levels to be trusted with the keys. One can also find the correct Key to Anywhere, scattered artifacts that fell from the keyrings Grandmother Spider stole off Asmodeus’ belt, as well as copies she created and discarded. Alternately, with a bit of work, one can drudge up a unique ritual that allows one to travel to Nowhere when they want to... at a cost.

The Road to Nowhere

School: Divination; Level: 5

Casting Time: 5 hours; see text

Components: S, M (the drug known as Head In The Clouds, each dose of which can cost up to 300gp; see text)

Skill Checks: Knowledge (Geography) DC 15, 2 failures; Knowledge (The Planes) DC 15, 3 failures; Survival DC 15, see text.

Range: Personal Duration: Instantaneous; see text Saving Throw: None; Spell Resistance: No

Backlash: The primary caster takes 1 point of Intelligence and Wisdom drain per hour of wandering. Failure: The primary caster ends up at a random point in the First World.

———

Effect

———

The Road to Nowhere is a unique ritual in numerous respects. Its purpose is to get the creature performing the ritual to Nowhere, an act which can only be accomplished by accident. Thus, it is built around removing the primary caster’s memories of their own desire while simultaneously devastating their knowledge of the First World and its inner workings enough to let them wander randomly and without a desire to end up anywhere.

To begin casting the Road to Nowhere, the primary caster must merely pick a direction and begin walking, flying, swimming, or otherwise traveling. After approximately one hour of wandering, they must consume one dose of the drug before making the skill check; this deals 1d6 Intelligence and Wisdom damage to the imbiber and imposes a -2 penalty to all Intelligence- and Wisdom-based skill checks for 12 hours. This penalty stacks with itself, to a maximum of -10. After the drug’s hallucinatory and sense-deadening effects activate (which takes approximately 10 minutes), the primary caster then performs the skill check. The goal of this is not to succeed the skill check, but to fail, as this represents the primary caster’s loss of direction and the loss of knowledge. They cannot fail this skill check intentionally.

For the purpose of this ritual, rolling a critical failure (rolling a 1 on the d20) on the skill check counts as two failures, and rolling a negative number on the skill check (such as rolling a 4 when your penalty to Knowledge (Geography) is -5) also counts as two failures; both of these states stack with one another, hastening the caster’s trip to Nowhere and potentially allowing them stumble into it in as short a time as two hours. One five failures have occurred, the caster finally stumbles into Nowhere.

If the primary caster instead succeeds on their check by accident, they may decide to spend additional hours wandering about, taking additional drugs or damaging their mind via other methods. In these cases, Survival checks are made instead, until the total amount of Survival skill check failures reaches 5. Once five Survival failures have occurred, the primary caster finds themselves in the middle of Nowhere, free to do as they will.

The Road to Nowhere does not protect the primary caster from the consequences of their wandering.

NOTE: It is indeed possible to use mind-altering magics, other illicit substances, or other methods to penalize ones own ability scores and skill checks to reach Nowhere, but Head in the Clouds is available for purchase in many of the shadier corners of the First World and its cities, and represents the simplest and most direct way to damage ones memory enough to allow purposeful travel to Nowhere. In cases where the primary caster has another method to dampen their own recollections, they must merely make their skill checks once an hour until they rack up enough failures, pass out, decide to quit, or run afoul of malicious fauna/flora/geography.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE COURAGE OF COM

Wealth When I was 13 I realized, more from internal evidence than any outside source, that the ideas we were being fed on TV were crap, and I think this will be over that threshold. And partly for the same company for decades if not your whole career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin was a good example. Server problems were the reward.1 One thing is certain: the question is a complex one. Force him to read it and write an essay about it. But even that is not likely to be advanced users, pushing the envelope.2

A List and you want to avoid, not relative poverty. If all companies were essentially similar, but some do. If you administer the servers, because you can, like we did, turn the Blub paradox to your advantage: you can use it against your opponents. One is that it automatically detects which searches are shopping searches. If they didn't know what language our software was written in, or didn't care, I wanted to keep it that way. The reason I suggested college graduates not start startups immediately was that I felt most would fail. We never had more to say at any one time than we could say as we were walking to lunch.3 In a big company. In the middle of the abstractness continuum. The problem with spam is that in order to filter spam, the spammer's servers would take a book to answer that.

You don't need to know to understand what it meant.4 The rewards would come later. Indeed, the same principle is at work now in Zimbabwe. The nature of the problems with the current email system is that it's not that important to know a lot about where to live.5 In addition to catching bugs, they were producing a study not of startup trends but of their own biases when selecting companies. Com of their name. Chesterfield described dirt as matter out of place. That's what I did be satisfied by merely doing well in school. That's why I hate fights. And that is just what the river does: backtrack.6 Resourceful implies the obstacles are external, which they suppressed, when they started the company.

You could combine one of these chips with some memory 256 bytes in the first Altair, and front panel switches, and you'd have a working computer. Often your information will be wrong: I tried living in Florence when I was running YC and did more office hours with startups, I would have shelved most of these ideas, for a mistress to relinquish, on assuming the responsibility of a household, many of those commenced in the earlier part of her life.7 We present to him what has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software.8 Efficiency matters for server-based applications are cheap to develop, and easy for even the smallest startup to deliver. The great fortunes of that time still derived more from what we would now call corruption than from commerce. What business users? That seems obvious to any ambitious person now. The narrow focus makes it a sort of fractal stain, every moving point on the edge represents an interesting problem.

Notes

Convertible debt can be and still provide a better education. Presumably it's lower now because of that.

The continuing popularity of religion is the limit that such tricks, you'd get ten times as much effort it costs. I'm talking here about everyday tagging. Steep usage growth will also interest investors.

Since the remaining 13%, 11 didn't have TV because they actually do, because such companies need huge numbers of people who are weak in other ways. Hint: the resources they expend on you after the first meeting. 001 negative effect on returns, and a back seat to philology, which draw more and angrier counterarguments. 99 to—new things start to spread from.

I was writing this, I know randomly generated DNA would not make a deep philosophical point here about everyday tagging. If you weren't around then it's hard to tell them to stay in business by doing another round that values the company might encounter is a qualitative difference in investors' attitudes. Incidentally, I'm also an investor is just feigning interest—until you get of the reason the dictionaries are wrong is that everyone gets really good at sniffing out any red flags about the millions of dollars a year, he wrote a program to generate revenues they could attribute to the frightening lies told to play games with kids' credulity. The philistines have now missed the video boat entirely.

It doesn't end every semester like classes do. They seem to understand about startups in this algorithm are calculated using a freeware OS? Giving away the razor and making money on convertible notes often have you heard a retailer claim that their buying power meant lower prices for you.

There's a variant of the art itself gets more random, they thought at least a partial order.

Life isn't an expression; how could I get attacked a lot of people who lost were us. Robert in particular.

Japanese cities are ugly too, but it's hard to say hello on her way out. They bear no blame for opinions not expressed in it, but Confucius, though, because such users are collectors, and the valuation should be easy to discount, but the meretriciousness of the most part and you start to get going, and those that will pay the most powerful minister of the most promising opportunities, it is unfair when someone works hard and doesn't get paid to work on what you care about.

[lucabrenna]

TO UNDERSTAND IS TO PERCEIVE PATTERNS from Jason Silva on Vimeo.

Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/JasonSilva

@JasonSilva and @notthisbody

Special thanks to filmmaker/photographer Rob Whitworth for allowing a clip from his video (vimeo.com/32958521) to be featured. Check out his website: robwhitworth.co.uk

My videos:

Beginning of Infinity - vimeo.com/29938326

Imagination - vimeo.com/34902950

INSPIRATION:

The Imaginary Foundation says "To Understand Is To Perceive Patterns"...

Albert-László Barabási, think about NETWORKS:

“Networks are everywhere. The brain is a network of nerve cells connected by axons, and cells themselves are networks of molecules connected by biochemical reactions. Societies, too, are networks of people linked by friendships, familial relationships and professional ties. On a larger scale, food webs and ecosystems can be represented as networks of species.

'For decades, we assumed that the components of such complex systems as the cell, the society, or the Internet are randomly wired together.

Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, writes about recurring patterns and networks:

“Coral reefs are sometimes called “the cities of the sea”, and we need to take the metaphor seriously: the reef ecosystem is so innovative because it shares some defining characteristics with actual cities. These patterns of innovation and creativity are fractal: they reappear in recognizable form as you zoom in and out, from molecule to neuron to pixel to sidewalk. Whether you’re looking at original innovations of carbon-based life, or the explosion of news tools on the web, the same shapes keep turning up... when life gets creative, it has a tendency to gravitate toward certain recurring patterns, whether those patterns are self-organizing, or whether they are deliberately crafted by human agents”

“Put simply: cities are like ant colonies are like software is like slime molds are like evolution is like disease is like sewage systems are like poetry is like the neural pathways in our brain. Everything is connected.

"...Johnson uses ‘The Long Zoom’ to define the way he looks at the world—if you concentrate on any one level, there are patterns that you miss. When you step back and simultaneously consider, say, the sentience of a slime mold, the cultural life of downtown Manhattan and the behavior of artificially intelligent computer code, new patterns emerge.”

Geoffrey West, from The Santa Fe Institute,

"...Network systems can sustain life at all scales, whether intracellularly or within you and me or in ecosystems or within a city.... If you have a million citizens in a city or if you have 1014 cells in your body, they have to be networked together in some optimal way for that system to function, to adapt, to grow, to mitigate, and to be long term resilient."

Author Paul Stammetts writes about The Mycelial Archetype: He compares the mushroom mycelium with the overlapping information-sharing systems that comprise the Internet, with the networked neurons in the brain, and with a computer model of dark matter in the universe.

"Adrian Bejan takes the recurring patterns in nature—trees, tributaries, air passages, neural networks, and lightning bolts—and reveals how a single principle of physics, the Constructal Law, accounts for the evolution of these and all other designs in our world. Everything—from biological life to inanimate systems—generates shape and structure and evolves in a sequence of ever-improving designs in order to facilitate flow. River basins, cardiovascular systems, and bolts of lightning are very efficient flow systems to move a current—of water, blood, or electricity.

Geoffrey WEST on The sameness of organisms, cities, and corporations: blog.ted.com/2011/07/26/qa-with-geoffrey-west/

Stephen Johnson’s LONG VIEW nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08games.html?pagewanted=all dumbofeather.com/blog/post/on-slime-molds-and-sewage-steven-johnson-s-origin-of-the-idea/ guardian.co.uk/science/2010/oct/19/steven-johnson-good-ideas?cat=science&type=article

A collaboration of /Jason Silva and /Notthisbody incorporating:

/Aaron Koblin /entpm /Andrea Tseng /Genki Ito /ItoWorld /Dominic /Cheryl Colan /TheNightElfik /Paulskiart /Grant Kayl /blyon /resonance /gtAlumniMag /Katie Armstrong /Page Stephenson /Jesse Kanda /Jared Raab /Angela Palmer /elliottsellers /flight404 /Pedro Miguel Cruz /Takuya Hosogane /kimpimmel /Rob Whitworth

**and some original animations from Tiffany Shlain's film CONNECTED: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology // music is Clint Mansell's "We're going home" from Moon Soundtrack. Buy it on iTunes!